The Real Cost Of Automation 1: Why the “Abundance” Narrative is Dead Wrong

To Policymakers: Elon Musk’s prediction that money will become irrelevant is 100% correct. The participation in trust is all that matters.

Go ahead and pull a dollar bill out of your wallet for a second. Take a look at those four words printed right on the back: In God We Trust.

At its core, money is nothing but a giant, centralized social contract. It’s a “Trust” network. You and I trade our finite, precious human time for these “contractual tokens” because we completely trust that the guy down the street will accept them when we want to buy groceries, hit the gym, or grab the coffee at any cafe we want. But what matters the most is the huge cost- sharing participation network it was build on: You got a cup of $5 coffee because thousand others are also buying it there. You get to buy a cheap plane ticket because millions of other everyday folks are silently paying into the exact same system, subsidizing the runways, the fuel refineries, and the air traffic controllers just by participating in the economy.

We all know the real cost of automation was never just about the cost of making the tech itself, but its way worse then that, that so call cost saving “narrative” is just a trap.

These tech elite think they’re turning cost of goods and services to “zero-cost ”. What AI actually do, it just snapping shortest cognitive path in handling tasks, but they couldn’t replace the “leverage” of human capital in this massive participation network. Automating “all” human labor: office workers, writers, coders, the cashiers, everyone of them has contributed back to the network by having a cost sharing function, yet, AI could simply snap this trust network in pieces and trigger a massive wave of demand destruction.

If you still want your coffee in $5? We need to look at the real cost of Automation and setup the parameters to put them in the right place.

The “Replace all Jobs” is not real productivity

New Technology was used to build the “foundation” of civilization. We built steam engines, automated looms, and assembly line arms to handle raw physical materials, which allows capital to grow and expanded our physical baseline while allowing human coordination to move up to a bigger network.

AI has done the exact opposite. It has gone straight for the easiest track, it mimic the highest valued task but do not participate in the capital expansion. When automation removes participation blindly, the trust system can begin to weaken. The logic is a mechanical down-spiral:

[Kill Jobs] ➔ [Wages Gone] ➔ [Demand Contracts] ➔ [Participation breaksdown]

The first layer of cost

The first layer of cost looks like this: The elite look at a hyper-efficient corporate entity run entirely by machines: let’s call it ROOLE (Robot Google), and celebrate its zero-cost infrastructure. But who pays for ads on ROOLE when no human workers have salaries to buy cars or shoes? Who watches a YouTube video about an exclusive restaurant when no one can afford the commute?

The product drops from “costing zero” could just means “ worth zero” ( difficult to actualize). The tech could not replace the participation layer that give the large scale economic activities it’s social value.

If AI writes every article, creates every video, designs every ad, and sells every product, but human participation keeps shrinking, then eventually you get a strange situation that production+ AI automation still exist but fewer humans are connected to the system that those things were originally built to serve.

These tech empires become isolated machines running loops in an empty studio, completely decoupled from a human population that has stepped out of the “workaholic mold” entirely.

This is not a future dystopia. This is the trajectory we are already on.

The first layer of cost is not the wage you lost. It’s the leverage in network no longer exists for everyone.

NEXT: The Real Cost of Automation 2: Where do the scale collapse and why the resilience buffer matters

Read the full series:

1. The Real Cost of Automation 1: Why the “Abundance” Narrative is Dead Wrong
2. The Real Cost of Automation 2: Where do the scale collapse and why the resilience buffer matters
3. The Real Cost of Automation 3: Rebalancing the Coordination by Interference

☕️ Trust the power of Humans, Join the Human Moat. Hopefully the article allows you to pause and think. Maybe something inspires you.

Thanks for buying me a coffee: http://buymeacoffee.com/rainbowlandgal